I like clouds – they are amazing things. I can stare at them for hours, lying on my back in a field or out the window of a plane flying through and above them. White and fluffy, and making all our weather work.
* insert Day Dream sequence here! *
Few hours later… a chance conversation with an IT expert stopped me in my tracks today. It was something I sort of knew, but the suddenness of it came through.
“In 3 years, cloud computing will be what we all use“, he said, “businesses won’t even be able to buy office servers anymore.”
Cloud Computing is something that has been around since the 60s, but has only really passed over into business consciousness in the past two or three years. All it really means is you login through the internet to do stuff (access your files, network, etc). Many of us do this already without even bothering or even knowing the term “cloud“. On diagrams of internet setups, people used to draw a fluffy cloud to denote “the internet”, and so the term stuck.
When you think of it, it’s blindingly obvious. Who among us really counts running office servers and networks as core business? It’s not is it, anymore than running a telephone system is! You get experts to do that, and trust the call goes through. Spending money on capital equipment and then maintaining it in your office, upgrading software and paying for the thing to be put right every now and again is a big pain in the nether regions.
And not core business. Stop it! Find a local guy who knows the cloud. And get on it.
